Y'know
by Rollerwings
Summary: They weren't quite as ready as they thought they were. After several workers met with horrific fates inside a planned children's birthday party venue, management's efforts to cover up the fiasco are made more difficult by an inquisitive and persistent local resident. He's clearly seen too much, so there's only one thing left to do... A one-shot based on the "Cancelled" teaser.


**Rating: T** for implied violence/death, mild cursing, tobacco use, intimidation and...brainwashing, maybe?

 **Setting:** Circus Baby's Pizza World, in the early 1980s (just a rough guess!)

 **Summary:** They weren't quite as ready as they thought they were. After several workers met with horrific fates inside a planned children's birthday party venue, management's efforts to cover up the fiasco are made more difficult by an inquisitive and persistent local resident. He's clearly seen too much, so there's only one thing left to do...

 **Author's Note:** _Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location_ and all canon characters, settings, etc. are the property of Scott Cawthon. This is a non-commercial fan tribute and was not written for profit.

You are free to use any original concepts, headcanons and characters from this fanfiction in your own work (fanfiction, art, etc.) if you'd like.

Views expressed in this fanfiction do not necessarily match the writer's.

Please understand that this is a speculative one-shot written using the early teasers, trailers and screenshots for the game. This will no doubt be massively retconned once the game is released; it was written for fun and with the speculation that a certain character may appear in the game, though there is no real evidence for that being the case, aside from what might've been the slightest hint in the "Cancelled Due to Leaks" teaser. That "local" in the hidden news article sure sounded familiar, y'know?

Also, this isn't exactly canon to my previous fanfiction involving these two characters.

* * *

"You're _sure_ that thing is deactivated?" Mitch Walton asked, watching a member of his work crew struggle to wheel a dolly across his restaurant's parking lot toward a waiting pickup. The tarpaulin covering the large and bulky load on the hand-truck momentarily fluttered in the breeze, revealing a metallic humanoid hand, still clutching a microphone against the motionless animatronic's short dress and petticoats. _A dolly on a dolly,_ Mitch thought grimly. The robot concealed beneath the tarp was to have been the failed restaurant's namesake character, the famed baby doll of Circus Baby's Pizza World, but recent misfortunes had forced the skeleton crew of workers to essentially "abandon ship," hustling Baby and her robotic friends out in the middle of the night.

"You betcha," assured Drew, straightening the hand-truck and wiping his brow with a handkerchief before calling for assistance to get the animatronic character loaded into the bed of the pickup. "She ain't gonna move."

Forced to work in the shadows of darkness, the team of would-be managers were mostly wearing sweat-stained dress shirts and were clearly not used to the manual labor they had been hastily pressed into, let alone clandestine cover-up operations such as the one they were performing now. Mitch looked anxiously back at the restaurant building they had been left with no choice but to quietly abandon, wondering how long it would stand as a vacant and empty monument to Fazbear Entertainment's latest failure once they had locked the doors for the final time.

"Good, because the last thing I need is for Circus Baby to come to life on the drive to her new home, like something straight out of a horror movie," Mitch grumbled. "Make sure that tarp is tied down _beyond_ tight." His request was met with a bitter chuckle from his friend Manny, who would have been his co-manager had the restaurant actually seen the light of day.

"You think _you_ have it bad?" Manny asked, pivoting around to glance at the backseat of his sedan, piled nearly to the ceiling with a tall, angular figure draped with another tarp. "I have the pleasure of joining this caravan with Funtime Foxy as my backseat passenger!" With his face pulled into an expression of worry that emphasized his hawkish features, he reluctantly closed the car door as quietly as possible.

"At least you have a truck cab separating you from Baby," he continued. "I _know_ they're dead in the water now that we've let their power cells run down to nothing over the last two days, but you'll have to forgive me for being skeeved out about being the personal chaufeur for these guys after..." His voice trailed off momentarily. "...After what happened to those poor kids." Casting his spent cigarette butt down to the gravel and twisting a shoe over it until the tiny orange glow disappeared between the stones, he scowled, not looking forward to the harrowing drive along twisting country roads, half of them unpaved, to the distant facility where the animatronic crew would be housed. "Promise me one thing," he asked, his voice no longer sarcastic but nearly pleading. "If at any time you _don't_ see my headlights behind you any longer, can you at least turn back right away and make sure I'm still the caboose of this operation? This whole plan has me beyond nervous."

* * *

"Hello. Hello?" A voice called out in the gloom, and Mitch spun sharply, hearing the sound of sneakers crunching across gravel toward the rest of the group. Extracting a thin flashlight from his pocket, the manager trained its beam forward on the individual who had surprised himself and his compatriots, seeing its light reflect across two large eyeglass lenses. Their owner threw his hands in the air in a gesture of mock surrender.

"Y'know, I don't want to be nebby but, uh, how come you're vacating your building all of a sudden? You just moved into the place!" The young man who had strode into their midst during their moment of distraction was now peering curiously at the vehicles haphazardly laden with animatronic figures and other equipment, his brow raised as though he already recognized this was no organized moving operation.

 _Oh, no. Not_ him. Mitch resisted the urge to clamp a hand to his forehead in frustration the moment he recognized the worker from the roller rink across the street from his own enterprise. Over the past few weeks, Mitch had caught sight of the kid out on what must have been his lunch break every day, sitting on the curb in front of the rink munching a sandwich with his mouth open and watching with great interest all the goings-on at the restaurant. Despite his insistence that he had no desire to pry into the operations of the restaurant crew, the guy was too naive to realize that by essentially waylaying them in the midst of their hasty clean-out effort, he had done just that. And now he had already seen far more than Mitch had ever wanted an outsider to witness.

"Also, are the rumors true about the gas leaks?" the young man pressed on earnestly, even before getting an answer to his first question. He scuffed a sneaker in the gravel, suddenly looking self-conscious. "My boss sent me over after we shut our place down for the night and asked me to find out if there's anything we oughtta worry about as well. Our building's a good forty years old, too, and we're no doubt hooked up to the same gas lines as you guys. As he said, if your building's in danger of going kablooey, maybe ours isn't far behind." Throwing his hands up in the air, he mimicked, complete with sound effects, what Mitch could only assume was supposed to represent a building imploding, then gave an awkward chuckle.

"Ah, it's Clyde, right?" Exchanging panicked glances with Manny, Mitch hesitated a moment before regaining his wits and greeting the newcomer, who nodded in affirmation. He strode forward and draped an arm around the young man's shoulder, introducing himself. "Mitch Walton. I saw you were interviewed in the newspaper yesterday, so I imagine you noticed us loading up equipment the last few nights as well."

Clyde looked a bit taken aback. "Uh, yessir, but only because a reporter approached me to ask if I'd seen anything." He looked down at the ground for a moment. "I sure hope I didn't say too much."

 _You said_ entirely _too much!_ Mitch wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream. _Don't you have anything better to do than stick around after work and on your breaks with your eye trained on this place?! Thanks to you, everyone and his brother is wondering what we're up to when we just wanted to keep this on the down-low!_

Instead, he said aloud through gritted teeth, "I'm sure you felt obligated to say something, but don't you have enough to keep you busy at your own workplace?"

Still staring at the gravel, when Clyde next spoke it was in a more reluctant tone. "Actually, sir, with the start of summer the rink's about to close for the season, this weekend to be specific, so I was kind of going to ask if you had any more room on your work crew. I mean, I'm a little older than most of the young kids I've seen working around here, but I'd throw myself into the job and I could sure use the money." He sighed. "But I guess I'm a day late and a buck short? You probably laid all those kids off if you're closing anyway, right?"

Mitch's blood ran cold and his grip on Clyde's shoulder tightened. "Er, right," he stammered. "They were all out-of-towners, anyway. We hired them from out of state and had to send them all home with bus fare after the gas leaks got the building condemned." _Don't ask any more prying questions!_ he quietly pleaded.

"Aww, too bad," the young man said with a natural innocence, clearly not in the least imagining what fate might have really befallen the team of workers. "So about the gas leaks, how come I never saw a repair truck from the gas company out here even once? You're at least gonna shut off the gas before you shove off, right?"

His confrontational words had sealed his fate; he had clearly seen entirely too much. Before he could raise a protest or react with anything other than pure shock, Clyde found himself roughly seized and half-dragged into the empty restaurant, its cavernous and vacant interior looming around himself and Mitch.

"You want to work so bad, maybe we could use you after all," the manager offered, gesturing to the nearest party table with rows of chairs set up along its length. "Fold these tables and chairs up and get them in the pickup. At this point we're really working against the clock and we need to hustle since we need to blow this popsicle stand no later than tonight, so you showed up just in time." As Clyde's face lit up with enthusiasm even as he reached for the first folding chair, no doubt eager to prove his eagerness to work, Mitch cleared his throat. "Just so there are no mistaken assumptions, though, you're getting paid under the table - heh, that was a joke, get it? - and I'm afraid this is a one-night gig before we're outta here."

The next hour saw Clyde laboring alongside the rest of the crew, toting the restaurant's hundreds of chairs out four at a time to the waiting trucks. Though Mitch kept a cautious eye on him the entire time, the work seemingly distracted him to the point that he at least ceased his prying questions.

* * *

"Phew, we managed it," Mitch said, slumping onto the empty show stage next to his new worker. His eyes moved to an imprint on the carpeted platform where Baby would have stood to perform for her young fans, had the restaurant not met with such a terrible misfortune before a single child could so much as pass through the front doors. "At least it's all finally outta here and we can sell this place, but I'm beyond beat," he admitted, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm.

"That makes two of us," Clyde agreed, flapping his sweat-stained t-shirt. Being in the empty restaurant felt uncanny, and it struck him that aside from the bright and garish paint that had been splashed over the walls to make the restaurant more appealing to children, any potential buyers of the building would likely have little idea of its previous intended purpose.

"You're actually not half-bad," Mitch interrupted his thoughts, carefully hiding the insincerity that threatened to creep into his voice, as he still strongly resented the young man for surprising them as he had. Clyde had removed a pack of off-brand cigarettes from his shirt pocket and was absentmindedly turning the box over in his hands. "Sorry for being so rough on you earlier, but this has been tough on me." Mitch sighed. "Just when I was picked to manage my own restaurant, some fool kid with a forklift slams the gas pipes in the utility room and wrecks everything. Now I've been demoted to being the part-time manager of some lousy entertainment rental agency."

"Y'know, that still beats working as a skate monitor when you're twenty-two," Clyde scoffed, offering a cigarette. "Want one? It's not like we didn't earn 'em after all that work."

"Sure, why not," Mitch said sullenly. Fumbling in his pocket for the plastic lighter he carried more often than not, he used it to ignite the cigarette before tossing the gadget to his worker.

"I halfway wish we could keep you on once we get situated in the storage facility we're moving all this over to. That's the new plan for the equipment from this place," he continued, taking a deep draw from the cigarette before slowly exhaling a puff of smoke skyward. "I'll be straight with you; we really took a bath on this restaurant and at this point we're stuck running on a shoestring budget. So it's been decided that for the foreseeable future we'll just rent the animatronics and tables out from our storage facility, for birthday parties, corporate functions, community festivals and the like." He snorted, rather disliking the cheap and acrid flavor of the cigarette Clyde apparently thought was so great. "Maybe it's not all bad. The kids will be wrecking their own houses at these parties instead of a place I have to help clean up."

"Huh," said Clyde thoughtfully. "Y'know, though, at least for the company there's less overhead, fewer employees to be paid-" Mitch cut him off.

"You've got to be kidding me!" he snapped, the hostility he had tried to withhold returning. "You may be a hard worker from what little I've seen, but you still talk like a dumb and naive kid who knows nothing about business. Fazbear Entertainment will probably see this as a _good_ thing in the long run, and once they find out how much cheaper it is to run this deal with as few workers as possible, they'll want to trim the fat even more and _I'll_ start looking expendable."

"Y'know what _else_ is dumb?" Clyde countered, his words cool and calculated despite the insult he had just absorbed. "The two of us smoking in a building supposedly leaking gas like a sieve." Returning his cigarette to the corner of his mouth, he defiantly crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the show stage. "That's right, I'm not so dumb and naive as I look and I wasn't born yesterday. You wanna tell me what _really_ happened to those kids?"

 _"You snot-nosed blackmailing punk!"_ Mitch shouted when he'd overcome his shock, rushing forward before his worker could react and clutching up two handfuls of his t-shirt, sending his cigarette forgotten to the floor and drawing so close Clyde could see the bulging veins in his neck. "You know too much, and you just got yourself in _deep."_ His mouth curling into a deviant smile as the only possible solution came to mind, the manager delighted when he saw Clyde's throat move in a nervous gulping gesture, and he abruptly released him. _Unlike those out-of-town kids, he'd be missed around here,_ he thought.

"Welcome to the Fazbear Entertainment family," Mitch said mysteriously, beckoning the other man to follow him. Too frightened from his outburst to disobey, Clyde found himself being led to the utility room, peering into the darkness of the small and confined space.

"Those kids left on that bus and that's the final story," the manager said malevolently. "But _you're_ not going anywhere, at least not yet." Shoving him sharply in the back and hearing a yelp of protest, Mitch picked up a large pipe wrench from the floor, and in the gloom he could see Clyde's eyes, wide with fear like those of a trapped animal.

"There's only one thing left to do before we blow this joint," he said, tapping the wrench in his other hand before handing it over to his astonished worker. "And you're going to be the one to do it. You're damn straight this building has no gas leaks, but it's sure as hell going to have some by the time we vacate it, and you're going to go to town on these pipes, then meet us outside." He chuckled evilly. "I'll be waiting out there, just in case it doesn't go as planned. Have at it, kid."

* * *

 _Me and my big mouth. How did I get suckered into this one?!_ Left alone with the wrench and a guilty conscience, Clyde knew he had little choice but to go along with Mitch's plan now that the tables had turned so completely, and hardly in his favor. Taking his best baseball stance from his Little League days, he caught the glint of a copper pipe just overhead and started swinging.

At first he only succeeded in dislodging a copious amount of thick gray dust onto himself, but with another well-aimed strike, the pipe came apart at its coupling, ice-cold water spraying like a geyser over him. Crying out in bewilderment and disgust, Clyde fumbled blindly for a shut-off valve, eventually finding one only after he'd been soaked to the skin.

* * *

"Wow. With _that_ level of incompetence, you're going to fit into the Fazbear Entertainment family just fine, though you'd make a lousy professional vandal," Mitch said as Clyde returned outdoors, facing a round of jeers for his pitiful, bedraggled appearance. "You really didn't know the difference between copper plumbing for the water supply and the gas lines?"

"I guess not," Clyde said sullenly, handing him the wrench while combing a hand through his winged hair that was now plastered to his head. "But the second time was a charm and your building's got its gas leak now. Go in and take a whiff if you don't believe me." He twisted sharply on his heel, ready to head home and forget the entire episode ever happened, only to find a hand seizing his arm.

"I never said we were done, but I do recall saying you know too much," Mitch growled, tugging him toward the awaiting pickup.

* * *

"Hello. Hello?" Clyde asked from a payphone at the most remote convenience store they could find along the way. Anxiously running his hand along the thick metal cord that connected the phone to its receiver, he waited until the local dispatcher requested the nature of his emergency.

"Er, yeah. I work at the roller rink across the street from that Circus Baby's Pizza Land," he said in a thin and strained voice, inwardly panicking when Mitch, leaning against the nearby truck, shook his head in disapproval. "Pizza Time. Pizza World, yeah, that's it. Uh, I was leaving work and the front door's just wide open and it reeks of natural gas all the way across the parking lot. I think you'd better send someone over to check it out right away." He hesitated, finally pleading, "just tell him to be careful." After confirming the address of the location, Clyde returned to Mitch, obediently dropping to the bench seat of the pickup.

"So what now?" he asked, his drenched clothes sticking uncomfortably to the vinyl seat. He felt like he was somewhere between being taken hostage and starting out on the adventure of a lifetime.

"Well, I can see you're not half-bad with phone work," Mitch said conspiratorially, "and while we may not need a teenage work crew any longer, it just turns out we _are_ looking for a responsible young...uh, phone jockey. Er, phone guy? Receptionist?" He ignited a cigarette from the vehicle's lighter, then glanced over at his companion, who had been left visibly stunned by the offer. "We need someone to book the rentals for the animatronics." Leaning in close, he added, "someone who has no choice but to show up everyday, accept the crummy wages and be loyal to a fault to the company, because otherwise I just might find out who vandalized my building and turn him in to the police."

"Y'know, I'll take it. What choice do I have, anyway?" Clyde asked in resignation. _You kinda got me on this one._

* * *

 _Three months later..._

"Hello. Hello?" As Clyde answered the phone, from his seat at a desk across their shared office Mitch couldn't help but grin. After being carefully fed a constant line of manipulative false praise and empty promises for eventual advancement from the management team, the kid had fully thrown himself into the corporate culture of Fazbear Entertainment. Not only that, he did everything asked of him with an eager smile on his face, never once questioning an order given to him or bringing up the string of incidents that had led to his somewhat forced employment with the company.

"Thank you for calling Circus Baby's Party Pals," Clyde continued, a vacant smile plastered on his face even if he and Mitch were alone in the office, which never saw any customers or other visitors. "Oh, you're having a company picnic? Then we here at Fazbear Entertainment would be happy to help you select a special guest sure to delight your adult and child attendees alike!" Pulling the booking folder from the desk, he perused the listings.

"You'll be happy to know all of our animatronic characters are available on the date you've chosen. First, there's Circus Baby, a real hit entertainer and storyteller for the small fry." Mitch's devious grin widened as he listened with approval, for his complacent worker was reciting the character descriptions verbatim from the employee handbook. "Then there's the graceful Ballora, who would astound your guests with her skilled dance performances and athleticism. Or if you're looking for a comedy routine appropriate for all ages, you could do no better than Funtime Freddy and Foxy. They're both certain to leave your crowd in stitches with their magic tricks and slapstick routines."

Waiting until Clyde had closed the deal, Mitch flashed him a gesture of approval. "You're too good to be true," he said, throwing another hollow feel-good statement his way because by this point, his young worker was certain not to recognize the insincerity behind it.

"Aw, thanks," Clyde responded, resting both elbows on his desk and gazing dreamily at the character posters hanging on the wall across from him. "Oh, and by the way, now that summer's in its final days, I already called my boss back at the rink to let him know that I'm sorry but I won't be back." He flashed a small grin. "As much as I liked that place, I found something better here."

"Y'know," he added, his mind drifting back to the eventful night he had been hired and finding it little more than a whirlwind blur of events he had willingly put behind him, "this job is the best thing that ever happened to me and I feel like I finally found my place."

Mitch looked up from his paperwork, smirking. "Hey, if your 'place' turned out to be hundreds of feet underground in a storage bunker surrounded by a bunch of restless robots, more power to you, but keep up the good work and I'm sure you'll have a bright future ahead of you at Fazbear Entertainment."

"That's good to know, because I plan on sticking around here forever." Clyde picked up the telephone handset once more, dialing in a delivery order for his most recent customer's event. "This place has its quirks, but what could possibly go wrong?"

\- End -


End file.
